A clone site of Newzbin could be winging its way onto the interwebs soon, after its source code was stolen.

Just last week the Usenet indexer went titsup due to legal action from the Motion Picture Association of America.

Not long after that Newzbin admins confirmed in a blog post that the code had unsurprisingly been leaked into the wild, but they didn’t take direct credit for it.

“Newzbin have not gone out of their way to ask the thief not to use their code; so we can only assume that it's use to create clone sites would be [sic] go unopposed," the post said.

“We're waiting on tenterhooks for some news of a public release of the code, we'll keep you updated on the matter if and when it actually happens. Added bonus points to Mr Code Theif [sic] if it gets released on Usenet.”

However, Newzbin hasn’t been resurrected yet. On Friday the mystery group behind the code grab sent out an email to all of the Usenet curator’s members.

Good news: we are Newzbin Two, and we have glad tidings: NEWZBIN IS BACK! and we are the new management. The crew got most of the original Newzbin source code and the main databases. We loved it too much to let it die.

The catch? We wont be up for a very short while cos things need to be done. For starters we need a cool domain name; also we need to hack on the code some more to make it run. We are nearly there but it is very complicated. We reckon we'll up very soon.

So don't drift off to those lame-ass wannabe NZB sites. Hang on for a little longer and the Big Dog will be back…

Mr White Team R Dogs/Newzbin2

Newzbin turned over £1m in 2009 but was found liable for copyright infringement in the UK High Court at the end of March this year.

As we reported last week, it's understood that the outfit owes the MPA £230,000 in interim costs - a full costs and damages hearing is still to be heard.